Sand in the Wind

by Robert Roth

  Childs sat by himself, violently cutting shavings from a stick with his bayonet. It had been almost an hour since Kramer — ‘the worthless prick’ — told him to go to the battalion CP and talk to the sergeant major. Two Purple Hearts weren’t enough. They wanted him to grovel and beg his way to the rear. Childs promised himself that if he ever got the chance, he’d make the company master sergeant pay. He pictured him sitting in his office in An Hoa, evading Forsythe’s question as to why he was still in the bush, not even bothering to lie that he would try to get him a job in the rear. No, Childs knew they wanted him to beg, and even then they would do everything they could to keep him in the bush. He flung away the remainder of the stick and sheathed his bayonet, but still hesitated before getting to his feet. As he walked towards the battalion CP, he thought of the things he would like to say to the sergeant major, to all of them.

  The first few men Childs asked said the sergeant major hadn’t even been there, but finally someone told him that he’d been choppered back to An Hoa. At first Childs was relieved, knowing that now he wouldn’t have to beg. But then it began to seem like a plot, of everyone and everything, against him. He stopped walking, as if doing so itself was an act of defiance, knowing that if he stood there a week no one would even bother to ask him why. His outrage increased. If the master sergeant had been standing in front of him, Childs would have been able, driven to kill him.

  Childs remained standing in the same place, paralyzed by the impotency of his rage. He heard a voice say, “I see them now.” Major Lucas had said this to the battalion artillery spotter. They were sitting together, a few yards away, while Lucas squinted through a pair of binoculars. “They might be children,” he added before handing the binoculars to the spotter.

  After a long look, the spotter said, “I think they are children.”

  “Can’t be sure,” Lucas replied reflectively.

  “You want to go ahead?”

  “Might as well.”

  The spotter yelled a set of coordinates to a mortar position thirty yards away, then called for some rounds of white phosphorous. Childs stood motionless, glaring at the backs of the two men as if he were looking at germs through a microscope. After the mortar rounds were fired, the artillery spotter casually called out an adjustment and yelled for two more. Childs raised his rifle, knowing he wouldn’t use it, and sighted in on the back of Major Lucas’s neck. He pressed hard enough to remove the play from the trigger, but no harder. While Lucas and the spotter speculated about how successful the rounds had been, Childs lowered the rifle and walked back towards his foxhole.

  Dusk fell upon a cloudless sky. For the first time in weeks, the men were allowed to fall asleep without the discomfort of wet clothing, and most of them were tired enough to take quick advantage of this. Their comfort was short lived. Two hours before dawn, the rain started again, it fell harder than at any previous time during the operation, flooding the ground beneath their hootches and turning it to mud. Sleep became impossible. One by one, the men sat up and wrapped their soaked poncho liners around themselves. In this manner, they sat shivering in the mud until the sun rose slowly above the mountains, its light and heat all but dissipated by a barrier of rain.

  Colonel Nash would have slept little regardless of the rain. The incident of the NVA helmets emphasized something he was already aware of — the lack of control he held over the men in his battalion. He knew the gulf between himself and them was caused by the absence of responsible leadership beneath him. Again the paradox had proved itself: war demands superior leadership; war dilutes leadership. The battalion was already five officers short, and it would be absurd to remove any of the remaining officers. This would merely place the lives of his men in the hands of less experienced and probably even less competent officers. It was not the fear of losing lives that bothered him. The possibility of such losses had to be accepted along with the responsibility for them. It was needless loss of life that worried him. He wondered how many men would die because they were in no condition to fight, or because a ‘fatalistic’ enemy had been goaded by atrocities upon their dead to sacrifice even more of their lives to take those of his own men.

  All logic and all of his training told Nash that it was just a matter of time before the enemy would succumb. Yet his experiences and intuition overruled this conclusion. The Americans had been constantly able to raise the price of a Viet Cong victory without being able to put it out of reach. He knew the possible reasons — the presence of a foreign race upon their land, a normal standard of living little removed from that demanded by war, the belief in their cause, the patience inherent in their culture — and yet none of these reasons nor all of them together seemed to explain the amount of suffering they chose to endure, it wasn’t the question of defeating the Viet Cong that bothered Nash. It was the realization that all the destruction he had witnessed was endured by a population so indifferent to the struggle before them that if not for the suffering they would refuse to recognize it.

  What little of the idealist that had ever been in him had gradually succumbed to his experiences in the military, but never before Vietnam had Nash considered himself a fatalist. His first few months in-country left him convinced that he was witnessing the destruction of a people and a cause so stubborn as to deserve, by their very obstinance, to survive. Now this destruction seemed no longer imminent, and was replaced by the destruction, not of his country, but of the myth that gave it life and in which he had once believed.

  The heavy rain prevented the men from building fires to dry their feet. They sat huddled in their hootches until an hour after dawn when word was passed for them to form up for a company-size patrol. Because they were to return before dusk, they left their packs behind. Those men with the worst cases of immersion foot remained in camp to guard the CP.

  The exertion of marching warmed the men’s bodies and made them oblivious to the chilling rain. Dark clouds limited visibility to less than a kilometer. While this made those at the point of the columns edgy about the possibility of an ambush, it had little effect on the men of Second Platoon. They were at the tail end of the formation and it was only necessary for them to be able to see the man marching directly to their front.

  The object of the patrol was, as nearly always, a careful search of a large patch of high ground. The men knew the march would be a long one, and they were grateful to be free of their packs. They quickly grew tired anyway. Before they had gone a kilometer, the rain again began to chill their bodies. As usual, their fatigue gave rise to a resentment of the constant marching and its seeming purposelessness; but as this fatigue increased, their resentment waned and was replaced by acceptance. The sight of their friends enduring the same torture as themselves forced them to endure it also. Regardless of their curses and complaints, each man was determined to continue. The root of this determination was as always, their individual pride.

  At ten o’clock Trippitt ordered the first break. The columns halted in the center of a field of rice paddies. The men sat down on dikes, making no effort to draw their feet out of the water. The heavy rain would have made this purposeless. Only a few of them bothered to open cans of fruitcake or date bread. The commander of the point platoon tried to match the obscured outline of some high ground with the topography printed on his map. As soon as he was sure they were headed in the right direction, he radioed Trippitt and was told to move out. The men viewed the short duration of the break indifferently. Lack of movement had caused them to become colder. It was merely a question of being tired and relatively warm or rested and cold. They also deceived themselves into thinking of the patrol as something that could be gotten over with instead of an allday maneuver as most turned out to be.

  Shortly before twelve o’clock, they reached the high ground that was the object of the patrol. A tedious sweep through it revealed a small but heavily populated ville. Though this was no surprise, the sight of it dejected them because they knew they would have to search it before starting back to camp
.

  Pablo and Sinclaire were standing security inside one of the hootches when Appleton took cover from the rain and joined them. He walked over to a small fire in the corner, asking Sinclaire gruffly, “No chance you had enough brains to bring that whiskey your bitch sent you?”

  “She ain’t a bitch, she’s my girl; and there’s a chance I brought it, but none of you getting any.”

  Appleton’s tone immediately became more friendly. “No shit, did you really bring it?”

  “Won’t do you no good one way or the other.”

  “Hey man, you sure were ready to drink with me when it was my bottle.”

  Sinclaire remembered how free Appleton had been with his own liquor, but was still hesitant to share the little he had left. Sinclaire also realized that Pablo would resent his drinking on a patrol, and he was now sorry he’d admitted to bringing it. “I’ll let you have some when I drink some.”

  “What’s wrong with right now?”

  Sinclaire glanced at Pablo, receiving nothing more than an indifferent look. Pablo didn’t want Sinclaire drinking and he knew Sinclaire realized this, but he refused to play the part of Sinclaire’s nursemaid. “We’ll be heading back soon,” Sinclaire said to Appleton.

  “Not for a while yet. C’mon, I’m freezing.”

  Childs and Hamilton had just walked into the hootch, and Childs asked, “What do you want him to do, put his arms around you?”

  “No, but I’d like to get my arms around him. The bastard’s got some whiskey and he’s holding out on us.”

  “No shit?” Hamilton asked with surprise. “How ’bout it, Sinclaire? I could use some warmin’-up myself.”

  If he took out his liquor now, there would be even less for himself. But Sinclaire didn’t feel right about refusing to share it. He withdrew the plastic squeeze-bottle from his pocket. As he lifted it to his mouth, Pablo said coldly, “Not here — with all these lifers around. Take it in the bunker.” Sinclaire led Appleton, Hamilton, and Childs into the bunker. They sat down quickly and started passing the liquor around. When it was Hamilton’s turn, he held the plastic bottle in front of his mouth and squeezed a long stream of liquor down his throat. The warmth of it hit him immediately, and he fell back against the wall of the bunker in satisfaction. It was too dark to see what he was doing, so those around him became startled when he scrambled away from the wall and yelled, “Dung lai!” All of them backed towards the entrance as they asked him what had happened. “The wall gave when I leaned against it.”

  Childs was far from unfrightened, but he couldn’t resist saying, “Hey man, people like you shouldn’t drink.”

  Hamilton ignored him and again yelled, “Dung lai! . . . I tell you it gave and then pushed out again.”

  The others were now convinced that Hamilton was neither mistaken nor kidding. Appleton could make out two silhouettes in the dim light of the entrance. “Some of you guys get out of here.” Childs and Sinclaire crawled out of the bunker while Appleton and Hamilton moved cautiously towards the wall. Appleton reached it first, and he shouted, “Dung lai!” while pressing against it. “You’re right, it’s phony. Stay back and cover me.” Appleton began to shake the wall while cautioning, “Dung lai.” It continued to give without falling, and he became more and more nervous as he tried to bring it down. Knowing the darkness would hide whoever was there even after the wall was removed, he was anxious to get whatever was going to happen over with.

  Hamilton was also nervous, and he said, “Let’s get out and throw a frag in first.” Part of the wall collapsed upon Appleton before Hamilton had finished speaking.

  “Dung lai,” he cautioned while crawling behind it. He heard the nervous breathing of someone too frightened to muffle it. A quick grab forward filled his hand with flesh, and he dragged the unresisting body from behind the wall. “I got him,” he yelled, pulling his prisoner towards the entrance. “See if there’s any more of them.”

  When Appleton emerged from the bunker, he was shocked to find he was holding a frightened and beautiful young girl. Immediately, men gathered around to find out what had happened. Hemrick walked over, and Pablo said to him, “I thought you checked out that bunker?”

  “I did. You saw me. I was down there ten minutes.”

  “You must have been beating-off,” Childs commented.

  Their attention was drawn away from Hemrick by Hamilton’s excited voice from within the bunker. “Sonofabitch, look what I got!” He crawled out with a grin on his face and an SKS in his hand. The girl was forgotten as the men gathered around the rifle. “Been wantin’ one of these babies since I got here.”

  Without malice, Appleton said, “Hey man, I was the one that did the dirty work.”

  Realizing that this was true, Hamilton said, “I’ll flip you for it — two out of three and I’ll give you the first.” Appleton agreed, whereupon Hamilton produced a coin and won two straight flips and the rifle.

  Appleton was still cursing and kicking his helmet at anybody in sight when Trippitt came over to look at the prisoner. He ordered the men standing around her to get on with the search. A few minutes later, someone in Third Platoon discovered a cache of rice. It had been buried in a huge urn. The men probed the ground around it with sticks, uncovering two more urns. Another half hour yielded nothing, but Trippitt ordered his men to continue searching. They did so grudgingly, knowing there would be barely enough time to get back to camp before dusk. Trippitt was too excited by the find to be worried about this now. Regretting that the hootches were too wet to be burned, he decided to send all the villagers to the detention camp at Due Due. The weather made it impossible to call in a helicopter. They would have to be marched back to camp with the company. He ordered his men to round them up. When this was done, Kramer reported to Trippitt, thinking that the company would now start back to camp. Instead, Trippitt told Kramer to make sure that his men were conducting a thorough search. “Don’t you think we ought to head back?”

  Kramer had hesitated asking this, but to his surprise Trippitt merely glanced at his watch and said without irritation, “In a few minutes.”

  Forest then walked up to him with a Chinese Communist grenade. “We found about a dozen of them in the roof of a hootch.” Trippitt immediately ordered a search of every roof. The men did so grudgingly, while worrying about getting caught out in the open at night. Most of them were soon gathered under the protection of the hootches, halfheartedly poking their rifle barrels into the roofs.

  A half hour passed without the men uncovering any more weapons or rice. Feeling he had waited until the last possible moment, Trippitt reluctantly ordered the company to form up. The presence of over thirty villagers prevented him from arranging his men in two columns as on the march from camp. Instead, he formed them into a single column with the villagers placed in the middle of it and Second Platoon on the tail end. Aside from a few young mothers with babies in their arms, all the peasants were small children or old people. Many of them had been able to gather a few possessions together, and they clutched them nervously as they were herded around. While their stares had been passive and sometimes hostile within the ville, their eyes now darted around apprehensively.

  After only a few minutes of marching, it became clear that the villagers were incapable of keeping pace with the Marines. Trippitt reluctantly ordered the point to slow down. The rain increased, and some of the children started to cry. The men became even more worried about making it back to camp before dark. Many of them thought to themselves that they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to wait as long as Trippitt had.

  The sky grew darker as much from the angle of the sun as from the clouds that hid it. The point man could see no farther than twenty or thirty yards to his front. After they had marched for over an hour, the cries of the children became less frequent. Then suddenly, there was a burst of rifle fire at the head of the column. The rain muffled the sounds of the shots, making it impossible for those men in the rear to tell whether they were AK-47’s or M-16’s. Eac
h man searched the grayness around him in fear, knowing that if it had been an ambush, it couldn’t have come at a more dangerous time. A medivac chopper would find it almost impossible to make it to them; and if one did, it was doubtful it could pick up the wounded without being shot down.

  No medivac was needed. The point man and two of the men behind him were beyond help. The haze before them had suddenly exploded with the muzzle flashes of numerous AK-47’s. The shots had been fired not at the soldiers themselves, but at the sound of their movement through the rice paddies. The point platoon had returned the fire in the direction of the previous muzzle flashes, then swept towards them. Thirty yards away, they found a wounded NVA soldier. He had been shot in the buttocks as he fled.